Team:Paris Bettencourt/Description
Description
The human microbiome can be defined as the complement of micro-organisms that reside in or on the human body in a symbiotic relationship. These microorganisms span all three domains of life, which typically interact with the human host in a commensal or mutualistic manner. Our project focuses on the human skin microbiome.
On one hand we are aiming to explore the skin microbiome, on the other, we want to develop tools to engineer it.
Our first project, Quaranskin, is the study of the microbiome of European people in this unprecedented context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed we think that the sanitary measure set up in almost all European countries since February 2020, could have an impact on the composition of our skin microbiome. Since we know that the skin microbiome has a direct impact on health, we can think that these changes in our lifestyle could indirectly affect our health. It is to answer these questions and also because the confinement represents a unique opportunity to study the microbiome under these original conditions, that we decided to set up the Quaranskin study. This project consists of collecting skin microbiome samples from 70 European participants, then extracting bacterial DNA and sequencing the v3-v4 region of the 16S gene, to know the composition of bacterial species. In parallel, the participants are asked to answer a questionnaire that covered 4 main topics: The intrinsic characteristics (age, sex, nationality, etc.), the hygiene habits, the level of confinement and any skin disorder that appeared since February 2020. In addition to proposing an open database of skin microbiome of European people in this unique context, the final aim of this study is to find some correlation between the microbiome composition with some characteristics of the lifestyle or with some skin disorder.
After observing the microbiome we would like to engineer it to propose some therapeutic solution. We focus our research on a commensal bacterium of the skin microbiome: Staphylococcus epidermidis. This bacteria hasn’t been used in synthetic biology before, therefore no tools are currently available to use it as a chassis. This is the reason why we wanted to develop a MoClo toolkit for S. epidermidis, EpiFlex. As proof of concept of EpiFlex we assemble a plasmid containing mCherry transcriptional unit using our developed toolkit, to then use it to transform S. epidermidis and hence make it glow in red, here is born the EpiGlow project! In parallel, a third project, EpiGrow, has been set up to optimize the transformation and culture protocols for S. epidermidis. Also, we want to compare the 3D and 2D culture growth of this bacteria by developing a 2D model of skin and a device to measure 2D growth.
These three projects together will allow us to present S. epidermidis as a good chassis for synthetic biology and thereafter to use it to fight against skin microbiome disequilibrium which leads to some skin diseases such as atopic dermatitis.
Learn more about these four projects!
